Introduction

Yuku kawa no nagare wa taezushite

shikamo moto no mizu ni arazu

yodomi ni ukabu utakata wa

katsu kie katsu musubite

hisashiku todomaritaru tameshi nashi

yononaka ni aru hito to sumika to

mata kaku no gotoshi

This is the prelude to Hojoki, the great work of literary witness of medieval Japan by the recluse Kamo-no-Chomei (1155–1216). These lines are, together with the portentous tolling of the Gion bell at the start of the contemporaneous Heike Monogatari, the most familiar opening lines in Japanese literature. Supple and melodious, they prefigure the language and substance of the entire piece that follows.

Hojoki was composed in 1212, when its author was in his late fifties. A mix of social chronicle and personal testimony, it is a comparatively short work organized in three main parts. The first tells of a series of calamities, personally observed by Chomei, that overtook Kyoto in the late Heian Period. The last part is a record of Chomei’s thoughts and life in retirement from the world in the mountains southeast of the capital, a life brought about in part by disinheritance from a prominent ecclesiastical family, in part by a desire to find meaning and peace in a nonmaterialistic world. The two parts pivot on a central section that is a scathing commentary on the human condition.

Basil Bunting, who based his poetic “condensation,” Chomei at Toyama, on an Italian prose translation of the work, wrote: “The Ho-Jo-Ki is in prose, but the careful proportion and balance of the parts, the leit-motif of the House running through it, and some other indications, suggest that he intended a poem, more or less elegiac; but had not time, nor possibly energy, at his then age, to work out what would have been for Japan an entirely new form, nor to condense his material sufficiently. This I have attempted to do for him.”

However, there is nothing provisional about Hojoki, and nothing tentative, beyond Chomei’s exhausted probing of the integrity of his purpose, indeed his questioning of his own sanity, toward the close of the piece. These very elements give the work an intense humanity from which it ultimately derives its timelessness.

There can be no question as to the essentially poetic intent of Hojoki. From the first lines, we are clearly aware of an enhancement of language that carries its subject in a crafted, rhythmic manner. Even someone ignorant of the Japanese language can detect in the romanized transliteration a restless rippling, and hear the stuttering gush of water over the consonants. There are countless other examples, for instance in the quickening of pace in the description of the fire. Words fly through the air like the cinders the writer is describing, in a flurry of staccato, “journalistic” in its best sense. This man was there, and eight centuries later, he is still out of breath. Again, later, in one of the most beautiful passages of the whole work he describes his companionship with a little boy, son of the warden of his mountain retreat; the language rises in visionary warmth as he describes solitary nights by his fireside, recalling his friends, hearing in the song of the copper pheasants the voices of his parents.

This musical “charge”—what Pound termed melopoeia—is coupled with a compelling visual dimension (phanopoeia). Again, from the opening lines we gain a clear pictorial image of the rushing water, the gathering and dispersing of the froth on its surface, but also of a setting of hillside rocks through which this river flows. Elsewhere, we see the fire engulfing Kyoto, spreading “like an unfolding fan,” just as later we share the visions of the fishermen’s braziers in a little cooking fire.

Then beyond this, most subtly, we encounter logopoeia, Pound’s “dance of the intellect among words,” in which words are employed not only for their plain meaning but for their cargo of nuance, irony, or association. Thus, in the opening lines, a man’s home is sumika, carrying the resonance of “abode,” “dwelling,” even approaching its modern biological sense of “habitat.” Or when describing the city of Kyoto as tamashiki-no-miyako, we are not to understand this as a capital glittering like a veritable jewel but more as a kind of gilded lily, “glorious” in the direction of “vainglorious.”

In structure too, as Bunting noted, the intention is poetic. The three sections—the disasters, the central pivot, and the latter hermitage—are held together by the recurring image of the House. First, we see the lofty towers—perhaps indeed jewel-encrusted—of the well-to-do. These appear almost to have a life of their own as they assert their dominance over the rooftops of lesser citizenry. But all the houses, together with their inhabitants, are buffeted and destroyed with supreme indifference by nature and by man alike. A fire that starts in an entertainers’ lodging house levels a major section of the city, reducing to ash both imperial chambers and common dwellings. A whirlwind destroys fences, so that you are no longer able to differentiate between your property and that of your neighbor. A capricious imperial decree orders the removal of the capital, so the ambitious office seeker must dismantle his house, float it down the river to the new location, re-erect it, and then, upon a new decree, pull it down again. Famine and disease reduce the most distinguished households, and even chopping up your home for firewood will provide heat for no more than a day. And of course an earthquake simply brings the whole thing down around your ears. The Imperial Household is transferred to present-day Kobe, where the new “palace” has the aspect of a log cabin, comically conceded by Chomei to be not without a certain antique charm. Through the latter part of the book, Chomei’s own social decline is conveyed in the progressively smaller houses he builds, deeper and deeper in the mountains. He finally builds a tiny hut, which gives Hojoki its name—literally “Writings from a Place Ten Feet Square”—and which in a memorable image becomes so overgrown we feel it almost melting into the side of the mountain.

This sense of the little dwelling sinking into the earth is part of a further skein of symbolism, formed from the four elements of nature, that also binds the work together. The work starts with the confident rippling of water, and closes with Chomei “well into my sixth decade / when the dew of life disappears.” The violent earthquake that topples mountains in the first part of the work is mirrored in a more benevolent earth gently embracing the hermit’s last home. The gales and floods that precede the terrible pestilence stand in contrast to “Autumn Breezes” and “Flowing Water,” the songs he later plays to himself on koto and biwa. The devastating fire of 1177, with the flames leaping whole blocks, faintly echoes in the companionship he finds in the dying embers of his own little fire in the woods. Then, each element is often interplayed with the other three with considerable deftness. A fearful wind feeds the spreading conflagration, the earthquake forces water to gush from cracked rocks, the capital itself depends upon the earth, the fruits of the surrounding countryside. Later, the snow melts to the earth in a striking image of the redemption of sin.

Clearly, Chomei’s intentions go far beyond the desire to make a platitudinous point on the question of the transience of man and his property. There is a sophisticated political attitude here, as well as a conscious crafting of textured image. But his rejection of the world is also a kind of edifice to which he feels dangerously attached, and he tells us as much. While he sets out a forthright statement on the abasements of materialism, we are also made conscious of an agonized ambivalence. We gain a suspicion that his own spiritual “construct” is also perilously close to collapse, and that he closes not in the silence of acceptance and wisdom, but in an anguished, despairing speechlessness.

Chomei was born in 1155, second son of Kamo-no-Nagatsugu, who held the rank of sho-negi at the Kamo Shrine, consisting of Kamigamo (upper Kamo) and Shimogamo (lower Kamo) shrines in northeastern Kyoto. His father’s rank was that of a quite senior prelate, master of Shimogamo. The rank also carried court influence and responsibilities. At the age of six, Chomei was accorded an official Court rank, also relatively senior.

From an early age his chief passions were music and poetry, and since succession to a position in one of the Kamo shrines appeared to be preordained, he felt able to indulge them. However, his family relations were complex, and the conduct of both secular and religious affairs of the day plagued by intrigue and corruption. Additionally, the young Chomei, as a precociously successful poet, cannot be said to have been the model of modesty and discretion.

Chomei was a member of important poetry circles, was successful in major poetry competitions, and was published in an imperial anthology (the Senzai-wakashu) by the age of thirty-two. What distinguished him from his fellows, however, was a fierce sense of social compassion. This is commonly thought to have developed later as a result of his disinheritance from the family positions and adoption of the Buddhist faith. However, as a young man he clearly went out of his way to witness the “many awful happenings” that befell the citizens of Kyoto and records them with a degree of engagement that would have been unthinkable to his literary contemporaries. The master poet Fujiwara-no-Teika (1162–1241) stated his own social attitude clearly enough: “My ears are filled with news of uprisings and killings. . . . I care nothing about such matters.”

The first of these, for Chomei, defining events was the great fire in the spring of 1177, shortly after the death of his father. The whirlwind followed in the spring of 1180. The capital was moved to Settsu (or Tsu) in the summer of that year. The famine occurred over the next two years. The earthquake took place in 1185. Moving busily among the people in such terrible circumstances, Chomei cannot fail to have noticed the growing influence of the populist Buddhist movements led by reformist priests, particularly Honen, who was to die the year Chomei completed Hojoki.

However, even as these contemporary events were leaving their mark on his thinking, Chomei was pursuing a career as establishment poet. Eventually, some twenty-five of his poems were published in imperial anthologies, ten of them in the great Shinkokin-wakashu, presented to the emperor in 1205. But Chomei was never one to ingratiate himself politically, nor unduly to endear himself to the powerful and the useful. Pursuit of the arts was surrounded by intricate etiquette, and a sometimes trivial-seeming act could have serious political consequences. For instance, in a famous episode, Chomei and some friends were having a music party and, carried away, Chomei played a biwa piece known as “Takuboku,” secretly passed down from teacher to follower and not to be performed unsanctioned in public. This earned him a rebuke from the Cloistered Emperor Gotoba.

In 1201, Chomei was selected as one of the thirteen members of the newly reconstituted Poetry Order (Waka-dokoro), mostly consisting of highly ranked nobles. Only Chomei and one other were of lesser rank, and quite possibly not entitled even to sit on the same level of floor as their “peers.”

In the course of his life as a poet, Chomei not only contributed to imperial anthologies, but also compiled a volume of his own poetry, Kamo-no-Chomei-shu (1181), a collection of about a hundred poems thought to have been written in his twenties. He also compiled a series of essays on poetry, Mumyo-sho, probably while working on Hojoki, which set out his thoughts on the writing of poems, with criticism and biography, as well as notes on manners appropriate to poetry meetings. Toward the very end of his life appeared Hosshin-shu—hosshin meaning “to aspire to satori”—a collection of exemplary stories about Buddhist monks.

This body of work and the poetry itself reveals Chomei to be an accomplished poet, with a graceful use of imagery and in firm control of language, also with clear concerns as to the intellectual and social context of the work. Yet as a poet he is not generally thought to share the towering distinction of many of his contemporaries, such as Teika, one of the principal compilers of the Shinkokin-wakashu, or Teika’s father, Fujiwara-no-Shunzei, one of the more celebrated of that collection’s poets, or the wayfarer Saigyo. It is Hojoki that provides Chomei not only that distinction, but an undisputed place in world literature.

In 1204 Chomei became a Buddhist monk and moved to the country at Ohara, near Kyoto. Four years later, he moved to Hino, to the southeast of the city, and that is where he built the last of his huts. Whatever finally precipitated his act of self-exile, it has been remarked that in leaving the world he discovered his sense of it, in particular a remarkable historical perspective. His own era was one of transition, a time of the final collapse of the power of the Heian court in Kyoto and the emergence of a series of military governments in Kamakura ruled by shogun. The period is considered the end of kodai (ancient times) and the beginning of chusei (middle ages), a time in which people seeking the protection of the powerful were giving away their property, and more and more of this property was coming into the ownership of noble families and major temples and shrines, as well as the emerging military class. This was a time of fierce political struggle as well as major civil disorder, and eventually civil war.

Such a world, with its dislocations and general sense of discontinuity, one might be happy to leave. But for Chomei’s reasons for renouncing the world, we rely on two anecdotes.

The first he recounts himself in his Mumyo-sho and it illustrates Chomei’s lack of political tact in his family relations, particularly with his powerful relative Kamo-no-Sukekane, who had become negi, or chief administrator, of the Kamo shrines. Chomei entered a poem containing the phrase “. . . ishikawaya-semi-no-ogawa . . .” in an official poetry competition. The poem was judged to have lost, the phrase being held to refer to a nonexistent river. There was a protest, and it is possible Chomei himself spread a rumor that the judging had been unfair. Judging was then entrusted to another poet. The new judge, also unfamiliar with the phrase, decided to consult Chomei before making a decision. Chomei explained that the phrase was an alternative name for the Kamo River and could easily be found in histories of the shrine. This incident became a famous humiliation for Sukekane (never on the best of terms with Chomei anyway), who was undoubtedly offended because someone in his position was shown to be insufficiently familiar with the history of his own shrine. Making matters worse, Chomei’s poem was included in the Shinkokin-wakashu.

The second episode appears in the diary of Minamoto-no-Ienaga, an official of the high-ranking Poetry Circle, or Waka-dokoro. A position as head of the shrine Tadasu-no-yashiro, part of the Kamo complex, became vacant. This position was customarily a stepping stone to that of sho-negi of Shimogamo itself, and in light of Chomei’s father’s former occupancy of it, Emperor Gotoba considered Chomei the man to fill it. Sukekane vehemently opposed the appointment. He thought that his own eldest son should get the job because, though much younger, his son had the higher rank and had worked for the shrine longer than Chomei. On hearing of Sukekane’s objections, Gotoba felt obliged to withdraw the appointment. Instead he sought to raise the status of another shrine and install Chomei as negi there. However, by this time Chomei had lost interest, as well as all ambition. (Later, after Chomei’s own death, Sukekane’s son was to meet a violent end.)

How thoroughgoing Chomei’s retreat from the world was is far from clear. He tells of revisiting the capital unashamed of his appearance as “a begging monk” and seems to have kept himself well informed of happenings in the city, although he severed connections with many of his previous circles. Strangely, in 1211, the year before he completed Hojoki, Chomei made the journey to Kamakura in the east, to visit the shogun, Sanetomo, also a poet. The purpose of this journey is unknown, although it has been suggested he wished to exert some kind of literary influence upon Sanetomo. In this he was almost certainly unsuccessful.

As in so many other cases before and since, Chomei, in retiring from the world, became the true wanderer in it. He and his work transcend not only place, but time too. Chomei’s literary immortality resides in Hojoki itself, in his unflinching determination to bear witness to his age, in defiance of the literary conventions of the day. The witness is conveyed in a remarkable range of tones, irascible, scholarly, compassionate, and self-mocking, with occasional pawky certitudes, even belligerence. But there is also an essential self-doubt in which the writer reveals not only his face, but his soul.

The impact of this work—the calamities, the witness, the luster of the commentary, the retirement—would be extraordinary enough, and the riches of the language a full enough reward. However, at the very end of the piece, Chomei creates a moment that is quite startling: he seems to open a door in the text and steps through, to address not us, but himself. He seems almost physically stricken by the realization that his minimal life in his hut has itself become an attachment to the world of illusion. His retreat from the world of sin and self-delusion has perhaps itself been sinful and has led to a stunning perception of emptiness and even insanity. It is at this moment that we see the true saintliness of this great man.

And to those who wish to know how they might bear witness in their own troubling times, Chomei says this:

To understand

the world of today,

hold it up

to the world

of long ago.